YouSaid · the spoken record

Barry Barish

lines on the record: 160
first: 2021-08-23
most recent: 2021-08-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So remembering what happens when you go to the amusement park. It's going to do something like stretch this way and squash that way, squash this way, and stretch this way. We do have an instrument that can detect that kind of thing. It's called an interferometer.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, not a real experiment. But then after that, then people believe gravitational waves must exist. You can kind of calculate how big they are. There's tiny. And so people started searching. The first idea that was used was Feynman's idea, and at the very end of it and it was to take a great big, huge bar of aluminum. Then put around, and it's made like a cylinder, and then put around it some very, very sensitive detectors so that if a gravitational wave happened to go through it, it would go through. And you detect this extra strain. That was there. And that was this method that was used until we came along. It wasn't a very good method to use.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You won't get the right answer. That's right. And in fact, if you take a road, let's say 10 meters wide, I've done these numbers and you ask how long you stay on the road if you didn't make the correction for general relativity, this thing you're poo-pooing, because you're using every day. You'd go off the road”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. It's in this thing. Every time it tells you where you are. How does it tell you where you are? It tells you where you are because we have 24 satellites or some number that are going around. Space and it asks how long it takes the being to go to the satellite and come back the signal. To different ones, and then it triangulates. Tells you where you are. And then if you go down the road, it tells you where you are. Do you know that if you did that with the satellites and you didn't use Einstein's equations?”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make you forward to Take the same phenomenon and look at it in all of space and time. Anyway, luckily. For you and I and all of us, the amount of distortion is incredibly small. So it turns out that if you think of space itself, now this is going to blow your mind too. If you think of space as being like a material like this table. It's very stiff. You know, we have materials that are very pliable, materials that are very stiff. So space itself is very stiff. So when gravitational waves come through it, luckily for us, it doesn't distort it so much that it affects our ordinary life very much.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something, but we see that kind of phenomenon all the time. Let me give you another example. Imagine that you walk up to a still pond. Now I throw a rock in it. What happens? The rock goes in, sinks to the bottom, fine, and these little ripples go out Can they travel out? That's exactly what happens. I mean, there's a disturbance, which is the safe, the bowling ball are our black holes. And then the ripples that go out in the water, they don't have any, they don't have the rock, any pieces of the rock.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right. So, what's happened is the presence of this massive object distorted the sphere of that the trampoline did. This is the same thing that happens to the presence of the earth. Earth and the apple, the presence of the earth affects the space around it. Bowling ball on the trampoline.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So imagine you have a trampoline. What happens if you put a marble on a trampoline? It doesn't do anything, right Yeah, I mean, just if I drop it, it's not going to go anywhere. Now imagine I put a bowling ball at the center of the trampoline. Now I come up to the trampoline and I put a marble on. What happens?”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience it. Well, if you experience a wave, imagine this is what happens to you. I don't know what you mean about getting close. It comes to you. So it's like this light wave or something that comes through you. So when a light hits you, it makes your eyes detect that I flashed it. What does this do? It's like going to the amusement park and they have these mirrors. You look in this mirror and you look short and fat and the one next to you makes you tall and thin Imagine that you went back and forth between those two mirrors once a second. That would be a gravitational wave with a period of once a second. If you did it 60 times a second, go back and forth. And then that's all that happens. It makes you taller and shorter and fatter back and forth as it goes through you at the frequency of the gravitational wave”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's weaker. Well, we didn't know what the strongest signal would be that we would see. We targeted seeing something called neutron stars, actually, because black holes, we don't know very much about. It turned out we were a little bit lucky. There was a stronger source, which was the black holes.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And luckily, things exist, and it is luckily because the effect is so small that you could say, look, I can take a barbell. And spin it, right? And detect the gravitational waves. But unfortunately No matter how much I fast I spin it. So, I know how to make gravitational waves, but they're so weak I can't detect them. So we have to take something that's stronger than I can make. Otherwise, we would do what Hertz did for electromagnetic waves, go in our lab, take a barbell, put it on something, spin it.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being three dimensional space, yeah, kind of oscillation, so you have to have something that's three dimensional that'll give what's what I call a quadrupole moment that's just built into this.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to have this what I call quadrupole moment. That comes about if I have, for example, two objects that go around each other like this, like the Earth around the sun or the moon around the earth, or in our case it turns out to be two black holes going around each other like this.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it means that he showed that with the distortion of spacetime, you could transfer energy. Just by this little idea. And it was shown theoretically. So at that point, it was Belief theoretically, then by people that gravitational waves should exist.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it was true that there were gravitational waves or not. And there was a very nice derivation by a British theorist from the heart of the theory that gets gravitational waves. And that was number one. The second thing that happened at that meeting is Richard Feynman was there. And Feynman said, well, if there's typical Feynman, if there's gravitational waves, they need to be able to do something. Otherwise, they don't exist. So they have to be able to transfer energy. So he made a idea of a Gdonkin experiment that is just a bar with a couple rings on it. And then if a gravitational wave goes through it, it distorts the bar. And that creates friction on these little rings And that's heat, and that's energy. So that meant”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And published it in what was called the Franklin Review, which is the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which is Benjamin Franklin Institute, which doesn't have a journal now, but did at that time. So the article is published. It's the last time he ever wrote about it. It remained controversial. So it wasn't until close to 1960, 1958, where there was a conference which brought together the experts in general relativity to try to sort out whether there was”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Editor of physical review was obviously intimidated by Einstein. He wrote this really, not a letter back like I would get saying you're screwed up in your paper. Instead, it was kind of, what do you think of the comments of our... Einstein wrote back. It's a well documented letter, wrote back a letter to physical review saying I didn't send you the paper to send it to one of your so-called experts. I sent it to you to publish. I withdraw the paper. And he never published again in that journal. That was 1936. Instead, he rewrote it. With the fixes that were made, change the title.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And he was a young man. His name was Tate. And he ended up being editor for years. But so he sent this for review to a theoretical physicist named Robertson who was also in this field of general relativity, who happened to be on sabbatical at that moment at Caltech. Otherwise his institution was Princeton where Einstein was. And he saw that the way they set up the problem, the infinities were like I make it as a student because if you don't set it up bright in general relativity you get these Infinities. And so he reviewed the article and told, gave an illustration that if they set it up in what are called cylindrical coordinates, these infinities went away.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The editor at that time and part of it that I don't know is peer review. We live and die by peer review as scientists send our stuff out. We don't know when peer review actually started or what peer review Einstein ever experienced before this time. But the editor of physical review sent this out for review. He had a choice. He could take any article and just accept it. He could reject it or he could send it for review.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you don't set it up right, you get infinities, which don't belong there. We call them coordinate singularities as a name. But if you get these infinities, you don't get the answers you want. And he was trying to derive now general relativity from general relativity gravitational waves. And in doing it, he kept getting these infinities. And so he wrote a paper with Rosen that he submitted to our most important journal, Physical Review Letters. And that when it was submitted to physical review letters, it was entitled Do Gravitational Waves Exist. A very funny title to write 20 years after he proposed they exist. But it's because he had found these singularities, these infinities. And so”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a special case. So I don't know. Anyway, Einstein then, an interesting part of the story, is that Einstein then left the problem. Most physicists, because it really wasn't derived, he just made this, didn't pick up on it or general relativity much because quantum mechanics became the thing in physics. Einstein only picked up this problem again after he immigrated to the US. So he came to the US in 1932. And I think in 1934 or 5, he was working with another physicist called Rosen, who he did several important works with. And they revisited the question. And they had a problem that most of us as students always had that study general relativity, general relativity is really hard because it's four-dimensional instead of three-dimensional.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Schwarzschild, who was a German theoretical physicist, he got killed in the war, I think, in the First World War, two years later or so. He's the one that proposed black holes, that there were black holes.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quadrupo moment that gives the gravitational wave. So he saw that again by insight, not by derivation. Set the table for which it needed to do it. At the same time, in the same year, Schwarzschild, not Einstein, said there were things like called black holes. So it's interesting that that came the same thing.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two years later, he wrote a second paper. And in that paper, it turns out to be important for us because in that paper he not only fixed his factor of two mistake, which he never admitted he just fixed it like he always did. And then he told us how you make gravitational waves. What makes gravitational waves? And you might recall an electromagnetism, we make electromagnetic waves in a simple way. You take a plus charge and minus charge, you oscillate like this, and that makes an electromagnetic waves. And a physicist's name hurts made a receiver that could detect the waves and put it in the next room. He saw them and moved forward and backward and saw that it was wave-like. So Einstein said it won't be a dipole like that. It'll be a four pole thing. And that's called.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so it was considered to be a heck of a leap. So first that paper was, except for this intuition, was poorly written, had a serious mistake. It had a factor of two wrong and the strength of gravity, which meant if we use those formulas, we would.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which he was very good at too, and that is he noticed that if he wrote the formulas for general relativity in a particular way, they looked a lot like the formulas for electricity and magnetism Einstein, he then took the leap that electricity and magnetism we discovered only 20 years before that in the 1880s have waves. Of course that's light and electromagnetic rays, radio waves, everything else. So he said if the formulas look similar, then gravity probably has waves too.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like most theories, then, in physics, you can have a wonderful one like Newton's theory. It isn't wrong, but you have to have an improvement on it to answer things that it can't answer. And in this case, Einstein's theory is the next step. We don't know if it's anything like a final theory or even the only way to formulate it either. But he formulated this theory, which he released in 1915. He took 10 years to develop, but even though in 1905 he solved three or four of the most important problems in physics in a matter of months, and then he spent ten years on this problem before he let it out. And this is called general relativity. It's a new theory of gravity. 1915. In 1916, Einstein wrote a little paper. Where he Did not do some fancy derivation, instead he did. I would call it used as intuition”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Because it's a distance. He gives a formula. Which is a product of the Earth's mass, the apple's mass, inversely proportional to the square, the distance between, and then the strength he called capital G, the strength he couldn't determine, but it was determined 100 years later. But no one ever saw a violation of this until a possible violation, which Einstein fixed, which was very small that has to do with Mercury going around the sun. Orbit being slightly wrong if you calculate it by Newton's theory. But so”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Newton's theory also Newton recognized at least one of the two problem solves to tell you. One of them is there's more than those, but one is why does the Earth? What's the mechanism by which the Earth pulls the apple or holds the moon when it goes around, whatever it is, that's not explained by Newton, even though he has the most successful theory of physics ever, went 200 and some years with nobody ever seeing a violation.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We learned gravity from New Right, you and you were young, you were told that if you jumped up, the earth pulled you down And when the apple falls out of the tree, the earth pulls it down. And maybe you even asked your teacher why, but most of us accepted that. That was Newton's picture, the apple falling out of the tree. But Newton's theory never told you why the apple was attracted to the earth. That was missing in Newton's theory.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Separately gravity Newton taught us goes like inversely one over the square of the distance apart you are. So it falls pretty fast.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, usually they think it's probably a long range force than we have now. But there are reputable colleagues of mine that spend their life looking for a fifth force.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Yeah, it's true. Why not? For us, it's very hard to detect these gravitational effects that have to come from something that has a lot of gravity like black holes. But we're pretty primitive at it at this stage. There's, uh, Very reputable physicists that look for a fifth force, one that we haven't found yet. Maybe it's the key. So, you know, it's.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To know something about that, the speed of light. Maybe there's some other way to communicate that isn't based on electromagnetism. I don't know. Gravity seems to be also have the same speed. That was a principle that Einstein had and something we've measured, actually.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably why are we so you know the statistics say that communicating with us I think that it's harder than people think We Not know the right way to expect the communication, but The communication that we know about travels at the speed of light. And we don't think anything can go faster than the speed of light that limits the problem quite a bit. And it makes it difficult to have any back and forth communication. You could send signals like we try to or look for, but to have any communication, it's pretty hard when it has to be close enough that the speed of light would mean we could communicate with each other. And I think, and we didn't even understand that. I mean, it's an advanced civilization, but we didn't even understand that. Little more than 100 years ago. So are we Not advanced enough, maybe”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jeremy's quoted as saying sitting down at a lunch, I think it was with Teller and Herb Bjork, who was kind of the And he sat down and he says something like, Where are they? Which meant And then he did some numerology where he calculated what they knew about how many galaxies there are and how many stars and how many planets in are like the Earth and blah, blah, blah. That's been done much better by somebody named Drake. And so people usually refer to the, I don't know whether it's called the Drake formula or something, but it has the same conclusion. The conclusion is it would be a miracle if there weren't other statistics are so high that how can we be singular and separate? That's so probably there is, but there's almost certainly life somewhere. Maybe there was even life on Mars a while back, but intelligent life.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, especially, I think people who worked like he did at Los Alamos and spent years of their life somehow had to convince themselves that dropping these bombs would bring lasting peace.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't write much. I mean, he died young. He would die soon after the World War. There was already the work by Teller to develop the hydrogen bomb. And I think he was a little cynical of that, you know, pushing it even further and rising tensions between the Soviet Union and the US looked like an endless thing. But he didn't say very much, but a little bit, as you said, that”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I think it's the same idea as this little book, The Ratchet of Science. Ratchet of curiosity. I mean, Whether you pursue take curiosity and let artificial intelligence or machine learning run away with having its solutions to whatever you want, or we do it, it's, I think, a similar consequence.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that information, maybe we didn't have the sophistication to know how to keep it under control. Fermi himself was a very apolitical person, so he wasn't very driven by, or at least he appears in all of his writing, the writing of his wife, the interactions that others had with him as either he avoided it all or he was pretty apolitical. I mean, he just saw the world through kind of the lens of a scientist. But he asked if it's tragic. The bomb was tragic, certainly on Japan, and he had a role in that. So I wouldn't want it as my legacy, for example.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think even more general than him, I give you all the virtues of curiosity a few minutes ago. There's an interesting book called The Ratchet of Curiosity. You know, a ratchet is something that goes in one direction. And that is written by a guy who's probably a sociologist or philosopher or something. And he picks on this particular problem, but other ones, and that is the danger of knowledge, basically. You're curious, you learn something. So it's a little bit like Curiosity killed the cat. You have to be worried about whether you can handle. New information that you get. So in this case, the new information had to do with really understanding nuclear physics.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I never liked the idea that you did experiments without really understanding the theory or the theory should be related very closely to experiments. And so I've always done experimental work that was closely related to the theoretical ideas.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult to do. Yeah, I think in both theory and experiment and physics anyway, it was conceivable if you had the right person to do it and no one's been able to do it since. So I had the dream that that was what I was going to be like for me.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a combination because he realized that neutrons had a characteristic that would allow them to go all the way into the nucleus when we didn't really understand what the structure was of all this. So that took an understanding or recognition of the physics itself of how a neutron interacts compared to say an alpha particle that Giulio and Curie had used. And then he had to invent A way to have enough neutrons and he had a team of associates and he pulled it off quite quickly. So, you know, it was pretty astounding.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seemed impossible they barely had been seen. It was hard to get very many of them, but it had the advantage that they don't, they're not charged, so they go right into the nucleus. And that turned out to be the experimental work that he did that won him the Nobel Prize. And it was the first step in fission, a discovery of fission. And he did this two completely different things, an experiment that was a great idea and a tremendous implementation because how do you get enough neutrons? And then he learned quickly that not only do you want neutrons, but you want really slow ones. He learned that experimentally and he learned how to make slow ones and then they were able to make go through the periodic table and make lots of particles. On fission at the moment, but he had the basic information and then fission followed soon after that.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But radioactive materials are hard to find, and so it wasn't prevalent. But if you could make them, then they had great use, and Giulio and Curie were able to bombard. Or something with alpha particles and find that they excited something that decayed and gave had some half-life and so forth, meaning it was artificial version or let's call it a not a natural version, an induced version of radioactive materials. Fare me somehow had the insight and I still can't see where he got it, that the right way to follow that up was not using charged particles like alphas and so forth, but use these newly discovered neutrons as the bombarding particle.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Radiation. He did this, came out of nowhere, and it was a fantastic theory. He submitted it to nature magazine, which was the primary best place to publish even then. And it got rejected as being too speculative. And so he went back to his drawing board in Rome where he was, added some to it, made it even longer because it's really a classic article and then published it in the local Italian journal for physics and the German one. At the same time, in January of 1932, Giulio and Curie for the first time saw artificial radioactive activity. This was an important discovery because radioactivity had been discovered much earlier. They had x rays, and you shouldn't be using them, but there was radioactivity. People knew it was useful for medicine.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't really know what the nucleus was, what radioactive decay was, what beta decay was when electrons come out of a nucleus. And near the end of 1933, the neutron had just been discovered and that meant that we knew a little bit more about what the nucleus is, that it's made out of neutrons and protons. The neutron wasn't discovered until 1932. And then once we discovered that there was a neutron and proton and they made the nucleus and then their electrons that go around, the basic ingredients were there. And he wrote down not only just the theory, a theory, but a theory that lasted decades and has only been improved on of beta decay, that is the”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. He was amazing, actually. He's the last, this is not the reason, I'll come to the reason in a minute, but he had a big influence on me at a young age. But he was the last. Physicists of note that was both an experimental physicist and a theorist at the same time. And he did two amazing things within months. In 1933.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we do study, it's conceivable. The black holes that we've found in our experiment, and we're trying now to understand the origin of those. It's conceivable but not doesn't seem the most likely that they're primordial. That is, they were made at the beginning. And in that sense, they could represent at least part of the dark matter. So there can be connections, dark black holes are how many there are, how much of the mass they encompass is still pretty primitive, we don't know.”
2021-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #213 – Barry Barish: Gravitational Waves and the Most Precise Device Ever Built · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source